The Grand Tour, as all students of classical art will know, was a 17th and 18th century precursor to today’s guided package holidays.

Well-heeled young men, fresh out of Oxford and Cambridge and inspired by the Renaissance, would head to the cultural centres of Europe, returning home months later with trunks full of books, furniture, paintings and sculptures for the drawing rooms and galleries of Britain’s great stately homes.

That many of them also came back with a nasty dose of syphilis is less well documented and shouldn’t, under any circumstances, detract from the general nobility of their cause.

Anyway, while we might have had lofty pretensions at the start of our own travels to follow in the footsteps of men like Byron and Derby's Joseph Wright, feasting our eyes on the glories of Florence, Turin and Naples, our Grand Tour is quickly turning into a continental pub crawl.

That’s not to say it’s not without cultural merit. In the course of a mere few weeks, we’ve drunk 10-year-old port in Porto, sipped wonderful, rustic gin in a Galician bar (that used to be a church!) and – my personal favourite – watched the sun set over the Atlantic while sitting in a Portuguese beach shack slurping warm white wine at two euros a bottle.

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Our defence, as anyone who has been anywhere in Europe will understand, is that it’s bloomin’ hard to traipse around the lovely, picturesque but often hilly towns and villages that keep appearing on the horizon without taking refreshment periodically. And, as someone who gets no refreshment at all from the thimbles of sludge-like coffee they serve up on the continent, there’s very little alternative but to cool off with a local beer.

Coimbra, where we paused for a few days, is a case in point. One of Portugal’s leading university cities, it has a remarkable collection of beautiful academic, cultural and religious buildings, all at the top of the kind of cliff even a team of Norwegian commandos would be hard-pressed to conquer.

Reaching the elevated cultural highlights of Coimbra requires a stop for refreshment

Halfway up, we stopped for a breather. It was a hot day, just around lunchtime, and we could hear cool, bebop jazz coming from a nearby bar. There was a table outside under a parasol so we sat down and before we knew what was happening, a charming young waitress had placed two chilled beers in front of us.

Again, I don’t know how it happened but, after what I thought was idle chit-chat with our host, she brought out a bowl of olives and a plate of anchovies and bread, saturated in a garlic-infused oil. After two more beers and a bowl of complementary crisps, we didn’t much care what the inside of the Citadel of the Sacred Heart of the Holy Mother looked like and spent the rest of the afternoon watching the world go by.

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To counteract all this indiscriminate drinking, I would like to say that we are doing a lot more cycling and walking these days … usually to nearby bodegas and supermarkets to replenish our dwindling stocks in the van.

Last week, aware we had to cut down, we had one of our periodic “dry days”. Admittedly, these sound like the sort of things alcoholics have to prove to no-one but themselves that they’re not alcoholics but to us they’re the equivalent of giving our livers a work-out before we go in search of the next interesting beverage that Europe’s artisan brewers, vintners and distillers have to offer.

Martin and Jane Wells are on a two-year tour of Europe in a camper van

After all, with the likes of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini and Dante firmly established as the mainstream, the new Renaissance artists are the men and women dedicated to producing ever more elaborate and quirky drinks, the Trappist monks of Belgium selflessly devoting their lives to getting the more discerning drinker hopelessly pie-eyed, the devout blue nuns of the Rhone heroically treading their grapes in the face of international apathy and derision.